It is a perilous thing for men or nations to deem themselves in any exclusive sense Heaven's favourites. Such conceptions do not minister to heavenly-mindedness, or beget lives of ethic beauty. The ancient Hebrews, blinded by this very belief, became "worse than the heathen," and herein lies a solemn warning alike for the beaten Boer and the boastful Briton! There is no true religion where there is no all round righteousness; and wheresoever that is wanting the wrath of God cannot but abide. [Sidenote: _A tight fit._] Our next day's march ended just as a heavy thunderstorm with still heavier rain broke upon us; so the Grenadier officers pitched their mess as close as they could get to the sheltering wall of a decidedly stenchful Kaffir cottage. There we stood in the drenching wet and ate our evening meal, which was lunch and dinner in one. In that one-roomed cottage, with a smoking fire on the floor and a heap of mealie corn-cobs in the corner, there slept that night two Kaffir men, one Kaffir woman, four Kaffir piccaninnies, four West Australian officers, one officer of the Guards on the corn-cobs, a quantity of live poultry, and a dead goat; its sleep, of course, being that from which there is no awaking. That they were not all stifled before morning is astonishing, but the fact remains that the goat alone failed to greet the dawn. Nearly every man in the camp was that night soaked to the skin, and for once the Guards made no attempt to sing at or to sing down the storm. As they apologetically explained at breakfast time, they were really "too down on their luck" to try. But with my usual good fortune I managed to pass the night absolutely dry, and that too without borrowing a corner of that horrid Kaffir cottage. The next night found us at Brugspruit, close to a colliery, where we stayed a considerable while, and managed to house ourselves in comparative comfort, that gradually became near akin to luxury. Here the junior officers courteously assisted me to shovel up an earthen shelter, with a sheet of corrugated iron for a roof, and thus protected I envied no millionaire his marble halls, though my blankets were sometimes wet with evening dew, and the ground white with morning frost. [Sidenote: _Obstructives on the Rail._] During the long halt of the Grenadiers at Brugspruit, the Scots Guards remained at Balmoral, moving thence to Middelburg, and one of the Coldstream battalions was detailed to guard the Oliphant River, station, and bridge, which I crossed when on my way to Middelburg to conduct a Sunday parade service there; but at the river station the train tarried too brief a while and the battalion was too completely hidden on the far side of a rough kopje to permit my gaining even a passing glance of their camp. In South Africa full often the so-called sheep and their appointed shepherd found themselves thus unwittingly forbidden to see each others' face.